PostMortem
by snarkypants
Summary: When it's over, it's over.  Maybe.


**Post-Mortem by snarkypants**

He's knocking at her door, in the middle of the night.

She sighs, irritated, not because she doesn't want to see him but because she's both tired and horny, and if he's going to put all the burden of refusal on her then, goddammit, they're going to fuck.

She opens the door and leans against the jamb, her arms crossed over her chest. "What?" she snaps, but he knows her well enough to know that her tone at, _fuck_, 2:17 in the morning is no reliable barometer of how she truly feels.

She smells beer on him, but not a debilitating amount. His eyes are too clear, his gaze too sharp, for him to be wasted. She knows how he holds his mouth when he's drunk, and he's not there yet. His clothes have an "old bar" smell to them, a depressing mélange of decades of cigarette smoke, spilled beer and greasy snacks.

"Did you love me, Liv?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"When we were together. Did you love me?"

She groans and her head thumps against the doorjamb. "Fuck, Elliot. Really?"

"This is so easy for you."

"_This_ is what we agreed to." She steps back from the door. "Well, come in, if you're going to." She turns her back on him and goes to sit on the couch, tucking her cold feet under her thighs. She switches on a lamp so she's not sitting in the dark.

He hesitates for a moment, and she wonders if he's going to stomp downstairs, leaving her door wide open. Then he comes inside, shutting the door behind him. He doesn't take off his coat, doesn't remove his shoes. He sits heavily in one of her side chairs and a bar-scented miasma rises in a puff from his coat.

"You're just fine; it's like it never even happened." He glares at her.

"You're wrong."

"You show up the next morning, all bright-eyed and smiling and buying breakfast. What else am I supposed to think?" He's slumped in the chair, his knees high and wide because the chairs are a little bit low for an adult male, which Olivia hadn't noticed when she test-drove them in the store; she bought them to fit a small space, not a large man. His hands hang limp in front of his crotch.

"You're _supposed_ to think that I'm faking it until I make it."

"Yeah?" He looks hopeful, almost wistful, like she just told him fairly convincingly that the Tooth Fairy is real, and she thinks perhaps she underestimated how much beer he's had.

"We don't all have the luxury of stalking around like we just lost our—" She stops and bites her lip.

"Best friend?" His mouth turns down.

"We both just need a little space and time. And now you need to go home."

"Can't drive like this."

"How'd you get _here_?"

"Walked." He yawns like an air raid siren, and she jumps.

"Oh, god, would you _shut up_? People around here like to sleep at night." She's exaggerating; her douchebag next-door neighbors have often as not woken Olivia up in the wee hours, but he doesn't know that.

"Sorry."

"You're an ass."

"Said I'm sorry."

"Why'd you come here tonight, Elliot?"

"I dunno." He tips his head back until he's looking at her ceiling. "I was remembering how you were after you split with Moss. And Cassidy. And—"

Rather listen to a litany of her failed relationships she cuts him off. "Oh? _How_ was I?"

If he notices the chill in her voice he gives no sign. "Cool. A cool customer. You never get your heart broken."

She scoffs. "That's all _you_ know. You think that I'd sit at home and cry?"

"Did you love me, Liv?"

Her first impulse is to correct him, to put it in the present tense, but what good would that do? "Yes."

He raises his head. "Maureen's getting married."

She starts and blinks for a moment at the non-sequitur. "Your Maureen?"

He nods, looking even more morose than before.

"That's terrific. Is he a good guy?"

Elliot snorts. "He's a _kid_." His mouth twists. "He's all right. Eddie Haskell little asshole, though. 'Good evening, Mrs. Stabler, what a lovely dress you're wearing.'" He mimics his future son-in-law ruthlessly, making him sound both whiny and pretentious.

"He's probably scared to death of you."

Elliot snorts again.

"When's the wedding?"

"Summer. They're doing the premarital counseling thing with Father Dennis. Maureen wants the Mass, the big party, everything. Kathy's ecstatic."

Kathy would be; she has the skill set to organize a nice wedding, and the sisters, girlfriends and children to execute her orders. "And how are you?"

He sighs. "I'm not ready."

"You'll have to find some way to be happy for her." Even though she rephrases it to sound nicer, it still comes out sharper than it sounded in her head, and he winces. But Maureen is getting married under the circumstances most likely to make any other Catholic father proud. Elliot is just going to have to pull his head out eventually.

"She doesn't need me anymore, Liv. None of them do."

"That's kind of the point of parenting, I thought. Or is this all about you?"

He grimaces and shrugs and then he reaches for her hand, holding it between his. He strokes her knuckles with his thumb. "I'm not ready for it to be over between us."

"Elliot…" She tries to pull her hand free, but he hangs on.

"I need something to look forward to."

_So do I, so do I_, she thinks. "Look on the bright side; maybe Maureen will have a kid soon, and then you can tell me I don't know how to feel because I don't have _grandchildren_." It's a low blow, and she knows it, but he's had it coming for years. And he probably won't remember it in the morning.

He glares at her and she succeeds in pulling her hand free.

She doesn't point out to him that, technically, biologically, he's had the potential to become a grandfather ever since she's known him; Maureen was a teenager when Olivia joined the unit, after all. And with all of Kathleen's problems a few years ago… well, they'd been lucky.

"Look, El, I do love you, I do. I miss the sex, and I miss being close to you. I miss the way you kiss me."

He leans forward, as if that was just what he was waiting for; he plants his fists on either side of her knees and moves in for the kill. If he were sober, there's no way on Earth she'd want to resist, but he's clumsy and he doesn't smell good, and it just reminds her of the reasons why it ended. Why she ended it. She stiff-arms him, keeping him at bay with her hands on his shoulders. "Stop," she says, but she doesn't need to tell him; he's already backing up.

He collapses back into the too-small chair, his face tight with anger. If she has to choose between soppy Elliot and angry Elliot she'll take the angry version every time; it's at least familiar.

"If you're miserable without me you were miserable _with_ me, too," she says.

"Bullshit."

"We'd fuck and everything would be fun and great until you remembered you were supposed to feel guilty about it, and then you'd stop talking to me, and you'd stop looking at me, because if you couldn't be faithful to your wife, you could at least be miserable about it. And after a while it's hard not to take it personally."

He scowls, but it's his guilty scowl, not his pissed-off scowl. "I never meant it—"

"I know you didn't. Doesn't change it, though." She stands suddenly, slapping her palms against her thighs, and she's meanly satisfied to see him jump. "So. If you want to sleep on my couch you can, but you're taking a shower first because you stink. Or you can go sleep in the crib. There's no way in hell I'm hauling your ass all the way out to Queens tonight."

He nods, uncharacteristically meek. "Okay."

"Okay, what? Shower or crib?"

"Shower," he mumbles.

She gestures in the direction of the bathroom. "You know where everything is. I'm going back to bed."

* * *

><p>She hears the water running. Hears the <em>thud<em> of the shower gel bottle when it slips out of his hands. Hears him say, "Fuck!" and she has to stifle her giggle with her pillow.

When he finishes and leaves the bathroom in a billow of steam she holds her breath, half expecting him to ease her bedroom door open and steal inside.

He wouldn't. She _knows_ he wouldn't, and she's a little bit disappointed by that. And a little bit turned on.

She imagines his hand on her foot, sliding up her calf, the back of her thigh. The two of them being so quiet, because making a sound would mean that it was really happening. Her thighs parting as he strokes her pussy, and then the heft and breadth of him on her, in her, and her breath stutters.

His footsteps pause outside of her door, and then he's moving away, heading towards the living room. There's another _thud_, another "Fuck!" as his foot strikes a leg on her sofa.

The sofa frame creaks and he sighs as he lies down.

She wishes she were drunk, too. If she were drunk, she could take off her pajama pants, pull her sweatshirt over her head, and go to him. She could wake him up with her mouth on his cock, ride him until they were both sleepy and sated, and in the morning she could save face by shrugging the whole thing off as a drunken aberration.

It would make things simpler, she thinks, and then she laughs silently; at one point Serena Benson probably thought being drunk would make things simpler, too.

It's better this way.

It is.

* * *

><p>AN: For those young'uns among you who don't know who Eddie Haskell is (sigh) ... he's the smarmy best friend on Leave it to Beaver who was always plotting trouble, but always sucked up to Mrs. Cleaver. (Iz old.)


End file.
